ABSTRACT
Janet was a master’s student in a social science discipline in one of the largest departments at the university where the study was conducted. We met her while she was attending the pre-sessional course in preparation for the start of the academic year. She volunteered to participate in our study, motivated, among other reasons, by the learning opportunities afforded through contact with us, using our interview sessions to ask for advice on academic literacy issues, such as how to cite secondary sources, or whether we thought there were coherence problems in her assignment (‘do you think my thoughts jump?’). A self-sponsored student, she financed her studies from the savings put aside while working for a branch of a multinational company in her country in East Asia. She had a clear goal: to acquire a specialism and a body of knowledge that would enable her to secure a better job in her country in the future, and was determined to achieve it, in spite of the difficulties she faced which we describe below. For instance, when lecturers’ support was lacking or their guidance wasn’t clear to her, she sought the help of other academic staff, her peers, friends, and former workmates at home, and ensured she completed her assignments on time, no matter how difficult or unusual they seemed to her at first. But she was also a vocal critic of her programme and her lecturers when she felt they failed to deliver what the university had promised.
